Rebane's Ruminations

The quiet is deafening

George Rebane

Gold is now comfortably at above $1,400 an ounce and rising.  It has risen over 28% in 2010 and over 170% in the last five years.  The other precious metals – silver, platinum, palladium – have done even better. 

The official word is that there is nothing to worry about.  The world economies are slowly working their way out the Great Recession.  Interest rates are low.  More fiat money is being printed daily to make it easier to borrow.  With all the pent up demand and new cleantech legislation just kicking in, the job situation is bound to get better in the coming year.  Inflation - excluding education, healthcare, food, fuel, and utilities – is low.  At the same time the biggest buyer of US Treasuries is now our own Fed using freshly printed bills to quantitatively ease the economy.  We are assured that none of this is monetizing (sounds better than ‘inflating out of’) our debt.  Things are looking up.

Meanwhile, over to the side, right there behind the curtain, central banks the world over are quietly laying in stores of bullion, as are corporations and private investors.  And who knows what it all means that also quietly, ever so quietly, people who don’t need to but can, are beginning to borrow as if they didn’t have to pay it back.  No one wants to spook the sheeple for then there will be hell to pay.  Shhh!

From the 29dec2010 WSJ – U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says it expects gold prices to climb to $1,690 an ounce, and potentially even higher, over the next 12 months as a new round of quantitative easing keeps real interest rates low and drives excess capital flows from countries with trade surpluses—which have traditionally parked their money in U.S. government bonds—into other investable assets, such as gold.  "We believe that the crisis of confidence in the financial markets is just getting started," says Peter Grosskopf, chief executive of asset-management firm Sprott Inc., which holds $6.5 billion of assets, including physical gold bullion. "Deficits will widen and we will continue to invest more in the precious-metals sector."

Pleasant surprise on the long drive home

George Rebane

We got back this afternoon from a Christmas visit to our ‘Northern Tribe’ in the Seattle area.  The ‘Southern Tribe’ (from SoCal) was able to join in to make a big family get together with our kids and grandkids.  Jo Ann and I said our good-byes on Sunday morning and drove away into the perennial rain of the Pacific Northwest.  With our puppy on board, we have abandoned the marathon non-stop runs between Nevada City and Seattle.  We used to make it in eleven hours and forty-five minutes door to door.  No more; going both ways we now stop in Oregon for an overnight, usually in Eugene.

Yesterday as we headed south, a little arithmetic indicated that we would arrive in Eugene too early to call it a day.  And things south of Portland indicated a clearing of the weather was in the offing.  So we decided to push on through the mountains to Medford for the night.  Jo Ann made the appropriate arrangements after finding a nice motel in Medford that took dogs.  The plans were etched in stone as we passed Eugene and started winding our way into mountains that now seemed to huddle under massive black clouds – where did all the clearing go?

The rain started with our first long climb through the still wet forests.  And the more we climbed the more it rained.  The highway seemed unusually busy for a Sunday with a lot of folks heading toward California at speeds above 70 in a driving rain on a constantly curving highway.  The wipers barely allowed enough visibility to keep everyone in their lane.  In that black sheeting night we appreciated the bright display that Carli (our name for the GPS) painted of what was in front of us.  Especially valuable was knowing ahead of time the sweeping curves of I-5 that became tighter as we climbed higher toward the three mountain passes that stood between us and a warm bed.  These would present the biggest challenges on their downhill sides.  And the rain just kept pouring down, with the drops changing to sludge balls when the temperature played footsie with freezing.

For unto us ...

 

Laughing at Laffer Again

George Rebane

Oregon’s sheeple voted to increase taxes on the rich a couple of years back to solve their budget woes.  Their dimwits with the eyeshades figured if nothing changed (the everlasting curse on a mind in stasis), that the higher tax would bring in an additional $180M.  Instead it brought in only $130M, and we're not even counting the loss of business, jobs, and related tax revenues.  At last count Oregon lost over a quarter of its 38,000 wealthy tax filers, and the state is now projecting even lower takes for 2010 and 2011.  In the next decade this tax policy will cause the state to lose 80,000 ‘wealthy’ tax filers.  And so it goes.

California, of course, continues to drive out its high-earners.  And the example of other states like Maryland – where in 2008 one third of its millionaires vanished from the tax rolls – just tumbles off the back of the scumbags who pander to the poorly endowed in order to get re/elected.  The bigger the economic calamity, the more they can pin punishment on the prosperous.  In the end it works out for everyone – the politicians get elected, enough voters remain convinced it’s the rich stealing from the poor, the rich are prompted to leave sooner than later, and the continuing lack of jobs demonstrates once more to such minds that more of the same will fix the problem next time.  The Peter/Paul Principle rules.

‘The eyes of Texas are upon youuuuu, all the livelong daaay, …’

Speaking of Texas, the Census Bureau reported today that there now 308,745,538 of us.  And things have shifted around a mite.  It seems that a lot of people have moved from Democrat areas to those usually voting Republican.  What were those people thinking?  The effect of that has been that 12 seats have shifted from predominantly blue to red, and that’s going have an impact as the new round of gerrymandering takes place.

Not a surprise to RR readers is that Latinos in America seem to be ‘self segregating’ according to the census people.  For some reason those people like to live more and more with people like themselves.  Maybe it really does have something to do with culture and folks being more particular to what they perceive as ‘their own’ culture.  That kinda frosts those who would like to see voters gather instead according to their definitions of class.  Oh well.

And Texas gained four more congressional districts while some of those New England blues gave up a bunch.  All together now, one mo time!

‘The eyes of Texas are upon youuuuu, all the livelong daaay, …’

Scattershots – 20dec2010 (updated 21dec2010)

George Rebane

FCC commissioner Robert McDowell concludes his 20dec2010 WSJ piece on ‘net neutrality’ with – “On this winter solstice, we will witness jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah as the FCC bypasses branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation. The darkest day of the year may end up marking the beginning of a long winter's night for Internet freedom.”  You may have heard over the last couple of years or so that our government wants to bring ‘fairness to broadband’s onramps’.  The truth, as many have explained over the months leading up to tomorrow’s latest government overreach, is far from 'fairness'.  What this represents is just the latest successful attempt to fix what is not broken.  Another successful enterprise will be brought under the cold hand of government control.  (21dec2010 update here.)

Jeff Hawkins of PalmPilot fame came up with a new paradigm a few years back (cf On Intelligence) for how machines can learn.  This is called hierarchical temporal memory or HTM. For some background on RR's Singularity Signposts please read this and see comment thread here .  Hawkins deduced a new generalized building block that would mimic how parts of the human brain work.  He argued that assembling these HTM blocks into a mechanical brain would allow the machine to do all kinds of clever things like learn and reason about the world.  To make all this real, he and cohorts started Numenta to commercialize this technology.

Now MIT Technology Review reports (here) that Numenta is starting to sell these HTM based adaptive learning systems that can do everything from detecting credit card fraud to predicting if a treated patient will suffer a relapse.

This, of course, bears heavily on what I have described (most recently here) as the ongoing and ongrowing crisis of jobs in America.  The bar for gainful employment keeps getting raised.  Consider what impact machine learning technologies (i.e. HTM and Bayes nets) will have on people who were looking forward to mid-level careers in the so-called ‘knowledge industries’.  Judging from their writings and spoken words, most economists and almost all politicians don’t have a clue about this tsunami.  But you do.

[21dec2010 update]  AtPac suit against County/Diaz finally becomes newsworthy (here).

Lovers in a Foxhole

George Rebane

Yesterday the Senate passed a bill to revoke the longstanding ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy banning gays serving openly in the military.  Senator and combat veteran John McCain pronounced the passage a “sad day” for the military, adding "I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage, and we could possibly … harm the battle effectiveness which is so vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military".  What did he mean by that?

Before liberals go ballistic on charges of unwarranted ‘discrimination’ and homophobia, it’s good to take a deep breath.  The opposition comes down to open homosexuality in a combat unit that is on par with open heterosexuality in such a unit.  I recall discussing this situation over the years, starting way back when I was on active duty as an artillery officer.  We always came back to the same sticking point – in combat you don’t want two people in love serving in the same unit that is in or about to be in harm’s way.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s your wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend or your same-sex lover.  People naturally make decisions that favor their lover over consideration for larger objectives the achievement of which would put their dear one in danger, or perhaps even sacrifice him/her.  Those kinds of considerations don’t belong in either the heat or anticipation of battle.  And if their existence is known to others, the collateral damage to cohesion and morale can be immeasurable, even to the point of totally compromising the mission and/or the unit.

So what to do about gays in the military?  Well, you can come up with a slew of other rules and regulations about who can get assigned where.  But if you have a unit that starts out with no one in love (or lust) with each other, but still have the possibility of that happening at some unknown point in the future, you have the same problem.  And it could be even worse for everyone if the lovers attempt to keep their relationship a secret from the others, because their actions will still be dominated by their concern for each other.

Because it also applies to heterosexuals, this is a tough problem that is totally independent of whether someone promotes or opposes other aspects of homosexual life – like same-sex marriage – in open society.  But I fear that its dissection will always bring in side charges of ‘homophobia’ etc to divert discussion of the real factors involved in having lovers share a foxhole.

The Liberal Mind – Government Subsidies

George Rebane

Most people consider government subsidies to be the transfer of some form of assets – cash/stuff/services that the government owns - from the government to the subsidized entity.  Not so the liberal of whatever coloration.  In their book the government effectively owns everything, and we the people are allowed to husband and use some things that government owns for a restricted interval that the government deems proper.

Therefore according to their logic, if the government could, say, tax someone or some corporation more than it is doing now, then those stipulated additional taxes not collected are termed by the lefties as just another government subsidy.  The same goes for the assessment of fees by the government and its agencies.  Since such minds can conceive of no limits to the tribute government can exact in taxes or fees, the amount of such subsidy can be anything that the progressive hand cares to write down.

Given that form of twisted logic, a liberal can claim that you are receiving any given amount of government subsidy if they feel that you should pay that amount as additional tribute, and are not now doing so.  The same, of course, goes for liberal claims of corporate subsidies.  And here the situation really gets wild and woolly.  Given the long history and complexity of collusion between government and industry groups, corporations, and organized labor, the progressive mind sees no end to subsidies that government continues to give to industry.

It all depends on how far back you want to go and which pieces of legislation or regulations you want to include in toting up the package of subsidies that you will argue industry has been getting.  The main thing to remember, if one attempts to understand the liberal mind, is that it all belongs first and foremost to the collective or government.  With this in mind, their talk of subsidies all makes ‘perfect sense’.

Jobs and Schools – we may be too late

George Rebane

[This is the 17dec10 transcript of my regular bi-weekly commentary on KVMR-FM 89.5.  I have provided links to the Compton school and Governor Pawlenty’s public service union references.]

Remember the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man, celebrated in legend and song.  He was extremely strong and fast at chiseling holes into rock and driving spikes to hold down rails.  He chose to go head-to-head with the newly invented steam steel driver in order to save his job; it didn’t work out for John Henry.

Ever since the early 1800s new technology has been trumping human labor to deliver more, better, faster, and cheaper.  Those who chose to compete with technology were swept away like John Henry.  But in the olden days new technology was still dumb, and workers had an alternative – do something else or retrain and learn to work at a higher skill level with the new machines that were flooding work places.  But as the machines became more complicated and capable, working with them also required more from people – skills that everyone could not master.

In the last fifty years technology added a new page to its game book – intelligence.  Not only could machines handle work with brute force and high speed, they were now adding smarts to the mix that would let them make fast and reliable decisions, decisions that only people used to make.  And today we have machines that can out-think humans in more and more areas such as medicine, finance, distribution, transportation, and war.  Furthermore, the cost, capability, and reliability of these machines are all racing in the right directions – or the wrong directions if you consider that more and more of us are becoming John Henrys.

In the world highly paid workers – aka Americans – can only compete if they acquire new skills in which machines are not yet dominant.  But in the United States our government has made that path extremely difficult through its near monopoly of the public schools.  Too many of these schools are now operated by so-called professionals, an alarming number of whom are not qualified to provide the education our youth needs, and instead, featherbed their jobs through government service unions.  The result is that our schools’ output consists overwhelmingly of young workers who cannot even class themselves with the legendary John Henry, a man who at least had a competitive skill set.

Parents know this and have started protesting the treatment that their children receive in government mandated schools.  Recently in Compton, California parents ‘pulled the trigger’ on a public school, demanding its conversion to a charter school that would better educate their kids.  This type of parental activism may start a revolution that could help put an end to our suicidal educational system.  The teachers’ unions remain vehemently opposed to anything that would get rid of their cadres of ignorant and stupid yet understandably compliant members.

On the larger scale, leading politicians like Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota are beginning to make a public noise against the growing cancer of government service employee unions.  If we don’t cure this systemic disease, we can see our future in the riots of Greece, Great Britain, France, Italy, and soon other European countries with equally failed socialist expectations.

Unless our educational system is rapidly reformed into a professional meritocracy, our new unemployment norm will climb above the 10% where it is now.  And from there it will keep rising as our students and unemployed take to the streets demanding an unrealizable redistribution of wealth – a solution put in their heads by dysfunctional teachers, political demagogues, and reinforced daily by agenda driven journalism.

Today the promise of green jobs to solve our structural unemployment problems is an intentionally distracting placebo.  India and China are making huge investments in supplying the latest energy efficient products with their burgeoning workforce.  It is they who will sell the world ‘cleantech’ products at an economical price. The only way we will buy any green technology manufactured here is when the government sticks a gun to our head and says ‘… or else.’

My name is Rebane and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, on NCTV, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

California’s Purple Cargo Cults

George Rebane

CARB met yesterday to establish California’s cap n’ tax carbon trading program.  RR readers are aware of how people who passed Econ 101 feel about this mournful event.  (For details and analysis of its larger impact, see Russ Steele’s report on NCMW.)

Meanwhile, the progressives are besides themselves with glee.  Half of them are happy that California’s ‘Global Warming Solutions Act’ aka AB32 will nudge us back toward the stone age, and the remaining dimwits remind me of the Cargo Cult natives of Papua-New Guinea.  These poor souls gathered on mountain tops after WW2 where they built crude wooden replicas of the DC-3s that America used to supply its Pacific forces fighting the Japanese.  The cargo airplanes brought in marvelous things the natives had never seen before, and for a little while that changed their lives.  Now they were trying to attract more of these magical mechanical birds out of the sky filled with all kinds of good stuff.  Such futile ceremonies went on for years.

Our ceremonies are just beginning.  To many of us it is beyond belief that hereabouts otherwise normal looking people believe we can create jobs manufacturing competitive green tech or ‘cleantech’ products that can be sold worldwide.  In that category China, India, and even Germany are miles ahead of us.  With our coddled and overpaid workers, it will be near impossible to make and sell anything competitively on the world markets.

The only cleantech jobs that CARB’s new mandates will enable are those created from the ‘government gun to our head’ that force us to buy and install overpriced and unnecessary equipment for our homes and businesses.  Much of this stuff is to be installed by properly licensed workers who will command outlandish wages for their efforts and our detriment.  The bottom line is that the Great California Exodus will accelerate.

The simple economics of the matter is that you can’t arbitrarily add requirements and attendant costs to boost an economy.  For example, mandating that all internal walls of California's buildings now must first receive an undercoat of specially processed purple paint to be applied by specially licensed union painters will not boost California’s economy, no matter how many purple paint painters are now out there putting on such undercoats.

However, in socialist economics this is a perfectly valid way for the government to stimulate an economy in doldrums.  That it hasn’t worked in communist countries and it didn’t work here during the Great Depression is beside the point.  Such historical facts are proscribed in our schools and never mentioned in the lame stream media.  Bring on the purple paint and the purple paint painters.

County fails to deliver Diaz documents – cost $20,250? (updated 21dec2010)

George Rebane

My sources tell me that – “On December 9, 2010, Magistrate Kimberly Mueller ordered Nevada County to reimburse AtPac for fees incurred in the amount of $20,250 for failing to produce documents as required by law. Magistrate Mueller found that AtPac was diligent in its attempts to obtain the documents, but that Nevada County failed to produce the documents without justification. It is noteworthy to point out that Magistrate Mueller specialized in intellectual property prior to appointment as a federal magistrate.”

Readers may remember the law suit brought against County Clerk-Recorder Greg Diaz and Nevada County in the matter of some alleged illegitimate transfer of intellectual property (software) by Mr Diaz.  The Union covered part of the story here.

When I called the county counsel’s office to confirm what should be a matter of public record, I was told that such issues would be referred to outside counsel that county has retained to handle this suit.  After asking for the outside counsel’s contact information, I was directed to a Ms Caroline Mankey in the 424 area code.

When I called Ms Mankey, she confirmed that such an order had indeed been issued, and that it was a matter of public record.  Nevertheless, she stated that she was not yet “at liberty to comment” further on the matter.  She and her colleague, lead counsel Mr Nabil Abu-Assal, would have to confer with their client before anything further could be released.  She asked that I call her back tomorrow for any additional information that might be available then.  I will do that.

At this time I will not speculate why the county and Mr Diaz, both claiming innocence in the matter, did not release documents that could well torpedo the remainder of AtPac’s suit, and instead are prepared to reimburse the plaintiff from county coffers as a penalty of their non-cooperation.

(For the record, I was asked by both offices who I was and whom I represented.  I responded that I was a private citizen representing no one but the audiences of my modest trumpets.)

[15dec2010 update]  This morning I called Ms Mankey as she advised me yesterday.  The receptionist dutifully took my name and the nature of my call.  After a short delay I was informed that Ms Mankey “was not answering her phone.”  I left my name and phone number with the request that she return my call.  In the interval further corroboration of the above reported action by Magistrate Judge Kimberley Mueller arrived by email.  It seems that Nevada County formally asked for “reconsideration of the Magistrate Judqe's November 78, 2010, Order (Docket No. 56) regarding requests for production of documents and admission.”  This request was denied yesterday and the order to produce the required documents still stands (pdf of court order Download AtPac Order 2).

Perhaps all this is not newsworthy.  Neither The Union nor Yubanet.com has yet to devote any real estate to its coverage.  Nevertheless, working in the back rows of this vineyard, we await Ms Mankey’s call.

[21dec2010 update]  Well, maybe it's newsworthy after all.  For the record, I sent Jeff Ackerman an FYI on the original post.  Did not get a response.  But this morning's Union featured this story on its front page (here).  Apparently both RR and The Union are being stonewalled by the county's attorneys on the matter; neither of us have yet to get a call back from Ms Mankey.  Going on no more information than this, it sure is beginning to look like either fog or smoke coming out of the Rood Center.

RR joins Sacramento Connect

George Rebane

Last week I received a kind invitation from Sacramento Connect (logo nearby) to have Ruminations join Sacramento Bee’s network of northern California blogs.  After making sure I understood the agreement that goes with such a relationship, I accepted and got busy doing all the ‘paperwork’ and installing the little pop-up toolbar that the member blogs feature when you visit them.  Thanks to my blog server TypePad, that little piece of homework is yet pending – you can see what it looks like on Russ Steele’s NCMW.

I’m not sure what all the means and methods SacConnect has to drive more visitors to RR, but I’m told that they will be forthcoming.  We’ll see.  In any event, I would like to extend a warm welcome to any such new readers.  Take a look around the various categories to see what kinds of stuff I write about.  On the socio-political posts most of the comment threads settle into some very helpful exchanges and expansions once the right-left pyrotechnics die down.  Lately such fireworks are almost all gone, and the loyal and loud opposition now exuberantly doubts my cognitive skills instead of my parentage, hygene, and morals – a much better state of affairs.

Here in Nevada County I also write a regular column for The Union newspaper, do a regular commentary for KVMR-FM 89.5, and irregular series for community television at NCTV.  The Union columns and KVMR transcripts also appear here immediately after they are published and aired.

If you are interested in what kind of a person writes these screeds, please see the About link for a short biography.  My beliefs, values, and outlook are marbled and expanded throughout.  A good stake in the ground for this can be found here.  Again, welcome to RR.

What is Art?

George Rebane

[For a change of pace from the heated discussions of our country's future and the fate of Man, I ran into this little vignette from a past correspondence, and thought that I would share it to see what kind of a response it would draw from the eclectic intellects I am grateful to count as RR readers.  Jo Ann's late Uncle Jerry was a chemist, artist, and a well-read intellect himself.  This piece is from the 6apr07 entry in my journal.]

Some time ago Uncle Jerry and I went around on the question ‘what is art?’ Or longer, can a person tell if something he is experiencing is art?  After some back and forth Jerry came to the conclusion that art can not be defined, only experienced and assessed on an ad hoc basis.  He also implied that being able to arrive at a precise definition of art would somehow cheapen or detract from the entire notion of art in the human experience.  I, as a technician, value the utility of precise operational definitions and believe that their abundance in any culture only serves to improve the human condition.  By ‘operational’ I mean formal or algorithmic to the point that ultimately it can either be programmed on or learned by a non-human (e.g. machine or alien intelligence).

With this preamble I will now ramble on and reconstruct the definition of art that became my contribution to that lost exchange. …

Art is an intentionally created stimulus the purpose of which is to give pleasure to its Beholder by first and foremost removing him from the time and place of its experience, and in the process evoking either a new idea or notion that expands/extends the Beholder’s understanding of ‘what is’, and/or ‘what was’ for an experience the Beholder remembers.  Second, art invites extension and repetition of its being experienced.  And the more powerful the art is for the Beholder, the more that art will create a longing or yearning for experiencing it again.

Finally, art has the ability to extend and/or augment the Beholder in his very being.  From that first experience the Beholder will now look at himself and the world in a manner changed.  This in the sense that the art now joins or is integrated into his overall measure of how he henceforth beholds and experiences life.  The relative power of art to the Beholder is itself measured in terms of the intensity and duration of each such effect on the Beholder.

The intentionally created stimulus called art can take the form of a static thing or a time extended experience – i.e. a painting, sculpture, …, or a song, symphony, movie, … .  For concreteness we restrict the purposeful creator to be a human.  Else the Grand Canyon can be included in the definition of art, with the putative artist being God.  In this case the purposive link becomes a matter of debate which operational definitions seek to avoid.

The above definition has so far been personal and subjective to the extent that it is a one-to-one communication between the artist and the Beholder through the mediating art.  Art in the cultural context is the extension of the above definition to a significant fraction of the members of a specific culture.  In that sense, art requires a statistic to be added – e.g. more than 50% of the Moravians consider ‘this’ to be art.  One American or twenty Americans cannot by fiat define ‘American art’ or art from America.  For such a broadly accepted notion, more like-minded Americans need to be involved.

However, twenty people, perhaps, can designate something as art specifically for the members of the Nevada County Brass Musicians Marching Society or people visiting the Getty Museum.  Their definition will be accepted to the extent that the one-to-one communications between Artist and Beholders is successful.

Finally, an Artist is a person who can create art on a volitional basis, and in so doing finds fulfillment.

High unemployment – the new normal

George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my monthly column published in this morning’s (11 December 2010) print edition of The Union.  The online version of it can be found here.]

This week another batch of economists got surprised.  What they didn’t understand again, let alone predict, was the nation’s unemployment rate – it jumped to 9.8% from 9.6%.  With all the stimulating that’s been going on, wasn’t it supposed to go the other way?  Fortunately, readers of this column were not surprised by the news, and some may even have prepared.

Let me be specific.  We have an ensconced government that has been and continues to be hostile to the creation of any jobs that do not involve government growth or subsidies.  If that is not enough, our government monopoly schools have produced a workforce that is rapidly going downhill in the global competition department.

Illustrating these points we begin with last month’s Survey of Current Business put out by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.  The report described “a dynamic group of companies that create high-paying American jobs based on significant capital investment and export prowess - precisely the kinds of jobs America desperately needs to build a sustainable recovery.”  This group of international firms has doubled its US workforce through a process called ‘insourcing’.

Ruminations - 10dec2010

George Rebane

Yes, the ‘rich’ can pay more taxes.  But when you make them do that, they will make fewer wealth generating decisions and take the attendant risks that make those increased government revenues possible.

- British students riot for more OPM
- The religious give more than the irreligious
- Nevada City protects its downtown businesses
- Where to put the new courthouse?
- Rep Boehner pulls a boner
- They tax you first, and during, and after you die

The ‘little darlins’ of Great Britain are tearing up London protesting Parliament’s decision to hike the costs of education.  These costs have gone up for all the reasons that we know.  However, the always remarkable response from the mis-educated brats is that their expenses should continue to be covered by other people’s money.  Their socialist curriculum somehow missed the part about how those monies are earned, and what motivated the earners to work hard for the cash to which they feel entitled.  They also have no clue that the more socialist economies don’t generate all that much to redistribute.

Years ago the WSJ reported on a study of charitable giving that measured how much more voluntary gifts generate than the charitable receipts from government mediated distributions.  More importantly, it was reported that the left-leaning secular humanists were pretty niggardly when it came to contributing their own bucks to worthy causes.  This has not gone down well with the people claiming the moral high ground.  Today DE Campbell and RD Putnam do an update on that (‘Charity’s Religious Edge’).

It turns out that people of religion give significantly more than those not so encumbered.  When controlling for all kinds of factors like giving to their own church/temple/mosque, the religious “actually give more money to secular causes than do secular Americans.”  The explanation is still the same old one – the seculars are mostly left-wingers who see the needy being provided for by a government that takes money from the greedy rich and redistributes it accordingly.  Given that, why should they worry?

Republicans Bamboozled?

George Rebane

I’m not sure that the tax deal announced by President Obama is all that much of a ‘victory’ for the Republicans.  In fact, I think that the GOP may come out bamboozled by the progressives when this piece of sausage finally emerges from Congress.

Backing off a bit, it is beyond clear now that the 2009 ARRA (familiar to RR readers as the American Re-election and Redistribution Act) has failed big time.  As JF Cogan and JB Taylor (‘The Obama Stimulus Impact? Zero’) report, data shows conclusively that “state and local government purchases of goods and services did not increase at all in response to the large ($862B) federal stimulus grants.”  The arguments are easy to follow and conclude –

The bottom-line is the federal government borrowed funds from the public, transferred these funds to state and local governments, who then used the funds mainly to reduce borrowing from the public. The net impact on aggregate economic activity is zero,… .

In light of these additional results, the left’s claim today that the stimulus packages were too small is ludicrous.

 

The truth of the ages remains the same.  It is the generation and aggregation of capital, and its subsequent commitment under risk that creates jobs and grows an economy.  As someone once asked, ‘When was the last time a poor person offered you a job?’  Without such aggregation we would all still be growing our own food and weaving cloth for our own clothes.  It is the concentration of capital that finally let people specialize and become expert at providing a certain good or service that their neighbors needed, neighbors who then could use the time to do something else to provide for the common weal.  (H/T to Chuck Asay cartoon for clarification.)

These are points that go beyond the ken of a socialist.  Even the famous Lord Keynes did not understand the effects of taxing capital income.  He demonstrated this by prescribing for Great Britain a post-war tax policy that stifled savings and growth for decades.  The incentives to take the natural risk that comes with creating enterprises that hire people totally escaped him.  When reminded of this, he dismissed it in high hubris by responding, “I doubt if people are often as actuarially minded as (such) calculation makes them.”  Well, it turns out that they are and always have been.

The arguments made by TF Cooley and LE Ohanian (‘The Bush Tax Cuts Never Went Far Enough’) nail this down.  People with money take more risk in starting companies and investing in them when they see a stable future in which their bets have a chance of surviving and prospering.  Tax cuts on income, especially capital income, that are temporary and expire into God only knows what will follow, do not invite people to risk very much of their accrued wealth.

Given this, the two year extension of the Bush tax cuts is a lame kick of the can down the road.  The prematurely celebratory Repubs are betting that in 2012 they can replace Obama and his road to global collectivism with something that will spur long-term economic growth.  The Dems are betting that they can continue to create enough economic pain (‘don’t waste the crisis’), from what they will advertize as the ‘Republican Watch’, so that their promises of socialist paradise will again buy enough votes to keep their agenda on the front burner.  Given the level of national debt/obligations, states in fiscal crisis, international assault on the dollar, and high unemployment, this wind is not blowing to the benefit of the conservatives or the country.

‘The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet’

George Rebane

Well, maybe not, but here’s a compendium of databases and knowledge engines from the MIT Technology Review which everyone should consider putting into their online reference folder.  Enjoy.

An Invitation to More Artful Polemics

George Rebane

"Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person."  Socialism (1951), Ludwig von Mises

Polemics – the art or practice of argumentation; especially countering the beliefs and principles of another person.  I am heartened at the general progress we are making on the local blog posts and their attendant comment threads.  The number and intensity of ad hominem ripostes is definitely going down.  And often the comments are excellent and well written amplifications and/or redirections of the topic(s) introduced in the posts.

Also I have noticed that certain readers are beginning to make a difference between calling someone, say, an idiot, and calling their idea idiotic or referring to a general class of idiots holding such an idea – there is a difference.  Unfortunately others still cannot distinguish between the arguer and their argument, but here hope springs eternal.  To me it is a joy to read a churchillian retort whose entendres not only demolish the target argument, but in its more nuanced reading uncovers the camouflaged barb that encourages and even accomplishes a more penetrating mission – perhaps the essence of artful polemics and a joy to the attentive reader.

(As an example, my all-time favorite churchillian retort is said to have been given in Parliament to one of Churchill’s great detractors.  In utter frustration the man shouted, ‘Sir, may you either die on the gallows or of a vile disease!’  To which the great Churchill immediately responded, ‘Sir, that will come to pass only if I embrace your principles or your mistress.’)

No doubt there are simpletons on whom such literary labors are lost.  But let’s not lose heart when such encounters occur.  For then it is an entertainment to watch them miss the point while still claiming its grasp.

There also seems to be more than a little confusion on the notion of what constitutes ‘name calling’.  It is one thing to state that ‘John Doe is a (pejorative label).’  Clearly John Doe has been called a name and the caller seeks to attach to John Doe all the attributes, explicit and implied, that go with the pejorative label.

Then we have the case where a class of people is delineated with perhaps a number of spelled out attributes.  The class is then appended with a pejorative label.  No specific individuals are named in this exercise.  Upon reading the described screed, John Doe sees that he possesses some or all of the enumerated attributes, enough so that he may claim or by others be assigned membership in the class in question.

At this point John Doe has neither been identified nor called a pejorative name by the writer/speaker.  For one, John Doe might not agree that the pejorative label is a proper descriptor of the class, therefore there can be no attachment of the pejorative label to himself, no matter his membership.   And even if John Doe does accept the class label, it is then he who pins that pejorative to himself in the process of an extended association.  In any event, the original piece has attached no pejorative label to John Doe.  As appropriate, that task is left to subsequent efforts.

Senator Doug LaMalfa is sworn in

George Rebane

The Steeles and the Rebanes were among those invited to the state capitol today to witness the swearing in of the senators newly elected to the California Legislature.  We bundled into Jo Ann’s van and drove through a clearing rain that turned into a beautiful day as we arrived in Sacramento.  We went up to the senator-elect’s office in the Capitol building and met the other invitees from the Fourth Senate district that Doug LaMalfa will now represent.

 

After enjoying coffee and puu-puus with the other guests, conversations with other conservatives and the senator-elect, we watched the proceedings on the closed circuit monitors in the LaMalfa office suite.  Everyone stood for the singing of the national anthem, the flag salute, and the procession of the colors.

 

When we departed in the early afternoon, it was from the offices of Senator LaMalfa.  May he have the good health and courage to persist as he charges into what promises to be a maelstrom of ongoing liberal lunacy in the coming legislative session during which so much of the state’s precarious future will be decided.  (Also see Russ's NCMW.)

(P.S.  Before we walked out of the Capitol, we went to the rotunda and into the staircase where the portraits of California’s recent governors grace the walls.  All the portraits of the governors are rendered tastefully showing them as statesmen and political leaders standing in front of appropriate backgrounds.  Then there is the one of our governor-elect and former Governor Jerry Brown.  It is glaringly unique and something to behold – behold it yourself below.  The expression reminds me of one suffering from consternation and puzzlement.  It sums up well his past administration and, I’m afraid, is the visage he again brings to our chief executive’s office.)

 

Surviving Augsburg Once More – 1945

George Rebane

[This autobiographical sketch recounts the Rebane family’s entrance into the post-war world of displaced persons just after the war ended in Germany, and before the ‘final disposition’ of the east European refugees would stabilize.  We and thousands like us were still in mortal danger of being forcefully ‘repatriated’.  This was to be our second escape from Augsburg.

The chronological order of these sketches and their links are listed below.  These and future additions, including other related travels, are assembled in the My Story section of RR.  Background on Estonia and stories from my earlier years during the war are marbled into the series 'Road Ruminations' written during our June 2008 return trip to Estonia.] 

‘Christmas in Stettin – 1944’ , ‘The Last Train from Stettin’ , ‘1945 – The year Easter was cancelled’ , ‘The War Ends in Liederberg’ , ‘Sixty years ago today – 4 May 1949’

This piece follows the events described in ‘The War Ends in Liederberg’.  The upcoming story of the Geislingen Displaced Persons Camp years will conclude the pre-America phase of my life.]

 

Our ride south from Liederberg in the back of the Army ¾ ton truck ended in Augsburg, the war devastated city where in 1518 Martin Luther was examined for heresy and escaped northward in the dead of night.  Within two weeks of the war’s end on 8 May 1945, the western allies established a series of collection points – it was too early yet to call them actual camps – for the hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who were lucky enough to find themselves west of the Red Army when the bullets stopped flying.  Vello, Ellen, and their son Jüri Rebane were among the very fortunate – or were they?

California’s Cleantech Road to the Cleaners

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my bi-weekly KVMR-FM 89.5 commentary that was broadcast on 3 December 2010.]

The news just keeps pouring in about the wrong track that California has taken, and on which it is now doubling down.  The state continues to be led by the gang that can’t think straight, and the voters expanded its membership in the November elections.  We remain convinced that what has not worked before is still the ticket to return us to economic glory.  The newly elected crew will do all it can to continue raising taxes, increasing the regulatory burden on businesses and consumers, and make us a permanent recipient of the federal dole.

Examples of some local attitudes and decisions that reinforce this statewide malady were evident in the recent Board of Supervisors’ 3 to 2 vote to add new sprinklers to all newly constructed homes in the county.  Is this another self-inflicted ‘benefit’, or did we have a Hobson’s choice?

Another example is all the hoopla about green or ‘cleantech’ jobs being promoted for the county.  These jobs satisfy arbitrary government mandates and have yet to prove economically viable in developed country labor markets.  They all need government subsidies to work, and they have yet to demonstrate any net economic benefit.  European countries have tried them and failed.  Before Spain pulled the plug, its cleantech programs destroyed over two jobs for every new one created.

America is already on the cleantech track sporting its own massive failures such as attempting to make ethanol environmentally or economically viable.  The latest shoe in this unemployment derby dropped in Greenville, Michigan.  There Unisolar, a much celebrated cleantech solar energy plant, has only replaced 320 of the 4,000 jobs the town lost when Sweden’s Electrolux shut its doors.  The common problem is that subsidized cleantech companies are just not creating the jobs, but they are costing taxpayers a bundle.  Unisolar does not expect to expand its facilities in Michigan.

Singularity Signposts – 3dec2010

George Rebane

This weekend (4,5 Dec) at Caltech’s Beckman Institute there will be a Humanity+ conference with the intriguing title ‘Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change’.  They plan to stream the presentations live.  Please check this site for conference information and streaming links.

Two aspects of radical technological change were recently announced.  The first was the formulation of a psychological theory that provides a “new explanation of how humans solve problems creatively — including the mathematical formulations for facilitating the incorporation of the theory in artificial intelligence programs — provides a roadmap to building systems that perform like humans at the task”.  This is a major step toward overcoming the long held skepticism about whether computers could achieve peer intelligence with humans.  Creativity in the various fields of human cognition has always been a hallmark that separates us from other critters, and most certainly from machines.  More here.

The software that will be written to implement the new discovery called ‘Explicit-Implicit Interaction Theory’ will need a computer that can at least match the processing power of the human brain.  This is estimated to be around ten petaflops, or 10^16 = 10,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.  Think of a flop as multiplying two long decimal numbers with a lot of digits.

Well, it turns out that the fastest supercomputers made by the Chinese and Americans have achieved petaflop (10^15) speed levels.  But recently there has been a lot of work done in the field of nanophotonics.  This is the technology of controlling data-carrying light beams at the nano-scale that can be incorporated into a new generation of computing chips.  Using light instead of electricity allows data to be transported faster inside the chip, and also to use less power.  Billions of tiny electric currents going along little leads or wires generates lots of heat.  That’s what makes the fan speed up in your computer when you do stuff like streaming video or making your pictures look pretty.

And now the announcement comes from IBM that they have advanced nanophotonics to the level that will allow its incorporation into ultra-fast computer chips.  They estimate that by 2018 advanced computers will operate at exaflop levels.  That is one hundred times faster than the human brain, or 10^18 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 flops (that’s a billion billions).  There is every expectation that during this eight year interval we will have the ‘creativity software’ created and operating on the world’s fastest computers.  More here.

It is anybody’s guess in these pre-Singularity years what ideas, solutions, and paradigms such computers will start spewing out when they are fed various kinds of data about our world and how we live.

Exit Exercise: Now put these notions together with what country will be doing what with what kind of talent in the maths and sciences.  China has more students in the equivalent of our ‘advanced placement’ category than the US has students in all our schools – and these kids are not preparing themselves to be lawyers or art history teachers. 

 

While we rush headlong into that storm

George Rebane

California has become one of the worst places in the world to start companies and do business.  Onto this reality we have stitched a plan to save the state’s economy through an anticipated flood of new green (pardon me, ‘cleantech’) companies.   The intent is to subsidize them to success under the helm of the California Air Resources Board that is becoming more Orwellian by the day in its regulatory excesses.  All the while we ignore what other countries will do to compete with us, and how other green companies in the US have fared.  Here is a glimpse of Michigan’s green experience.

Built on technologies that are new and evolving, green industries spawn lots of start-ups, but they can shrivel just as quickly. Other countries are also pushing—and subsidizing—these same industries, making it hard for them to take root and expand in costlier locales like the U.S.

"Many places are looking for a miracle, and they think alternative energy plants are going to be a savior," says Daniel Meckstroth, an economist at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an Arlington, Va., public policy and research group. But the businesses aren't large enough or growing fast enough to create large pools of employment.

More here.